As Chuck Hagel endures the grueling confirmation process for the defense secretary position, BET.com David Swerdlick writes that U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice was actually shrewd in withdrawing from the process completely.

Hagel will still likely be confirmed, but his lackluster testimony may have exposed him as having been out of politics too long for the partisan climate that's taken over in the Obama era.

And by comparison, Rice — who'll continue to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — spared herself the indignity of being dressed-down on national TV by the same people who brought you the Iraq war, while avoiding what was shaping up to be a likely filibuster of her nomination and looking positively magnanimous for putting her own ambition aside and declining to be a punching bag for senators looking to take cheap shots at anyone on the Obama foreign policy team.

Because if McCain and Senate Republicans were willing to excoriate Hagel — himself once a Senate Republican and co-chair of McCain's 2000 presidential campaign — you can only imagine how they would have approached Rice, who's younger, a woman, has never been in Congress and is considered part of the president's inner circle.

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